


So Few Come Back

by tiffany rawlins (wearemany), wearemany



Category: All About Eve (1950)
Genre: F/F, Femslash, Post-Movie(s), Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2004, recipient:pearl-o
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-12-25
Updated: 2004-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-16 03:13:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/167809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wearemany/pseuds/tiffany%20rawlins, https://archiveofourown.org/users/wearemany/pseuds/wearemany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Like any picture, the audience will see in it what they want to see in themselves. True fans always do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	So Few Come Back

> Eve: But -- Hollywood! You mustn't stay out there.  
> Bill: It's only a one-picture deal.  
> Eve: So few come back.

*

The girl from _Ladies' Home Journal_ is late. Martha hands me another drink and reminds me that if I stay out in the sun much longer I will be red as a tomato by supper. I am contractually obligated to be fair, of skin and of mind, and so I allow her to raise an umbrella throwing shade over me and the corner of the swimming pool. I prefer to be in the sun.

All this lounging about is an artifice, a California script designed to play out under the obsessive eye of adoring fans everywhere. I have three scenes to memorize, four parties to attend, a wardrobe to approve, and six more interviews before the weekend is over. I am due on the set just after dawn on Monday. I am apparently still expected to offer the allure of an unburdened lady of leisure, my success having sprung eternal and invisible, an immaculate conception of celebrity. I am exhausted with boredom.

When she arrives, Janie from _Ladies' Home Journal_ is just like all the others. Her hair is bleached, her dress a careful replica of one Natalie Wood wore last month. She eagerly accepts iced tea despite the fact that it requires her to balance her notebook on her knee. She tells me that Higher the Mountain is her favorite of my films.

Addison once said that the difference between a critic and a sycophant is that critics pay compliments and sycophants have sentiments. In this, as in nearly everything, Addison was right. My sycophants are now paid tidy sums by a tight-fisted banker with a predilection for smooth-faced boys. He keeps my money and I keep his secrets, and I never rely on anyone I haven't financed to do me a favor.

Janie has nice, trim legs, a teasing turn of the ankle that must serve her well. She is smart enough to put her glass on the Mexican tile and perch with her pen poised above the notebook, like a cartoon of a lady reporter. I close my eyes and lie back on the chaise.

"Is it true about you and Kirk Douglas?"

I open one eye. "That depends on what you mean by true."

She giggles. "You and Howard Hughes?"

"Strictly business."

"You and Claudia Caswell?" I raise myself on one elbow and casually ignore the insinuation. She leans forward. "That you two knew each other in New York?"

"Oh, that." I relax. "Our paths crossed a time or two." Miss Caswell was just smart enough to act surprised when I followed her into Margo's powder room, and not quite dumb enough to tell anyone important. All the same, I don't appreciate having our names linked. I may have won awards but she has a world of powerful men willing to wage war over her. "Actually she was already struggling to be taken seriously," I say. "She couldn't even land a little role as my kid sister."

"I hear she's going to marry that playwright."

In New York there are more eligible playwrights than dime store novels, and the men are worth only slightly more. I give Janie a nickel of a smile and fan myself.

"Do you ever still talk to your theater friends, Miss Harrington?"

Last week, Bill's agent told Zanuck that Bill would rather shoot on Everest than direct my new picture. It's the closest we've come to speaking in six years. "I find it rather like corresponding with school chums," I say. "It feels so very long ago, almost as if I were but a child. Anyway I prefer the youthful spirit of my Hollywood set."

"You know, in our January issue we ran a pictorial about Miss Channing's, I mean, Mrs. Samson's, new nursery."

If I never see Bill or Lloyd or Addison again I will lose no sleep. But a stray mention of Margo still makes my throat burn. And yet there she is again and again, the shadow of Margo, the glamorous success of Margo, the cruel and casual dismissal by Margo of all my accomplishments. Never has someone who touched me so little done so much damage to my thick skin.

Still, I have endured three lectures in a year about my supercilious attitude towards my early success. I am told movie-goers appreciate humility. I try for something in between. "Margo was always so good at playing mother hen. I'm surprised she doesn't have a menagerie."

Janie consults her notes and bites at her lip. "Can we discuss this new picture of yours?" She seems embarrassed even to bring it up. Strangely more ashamed than the subject merits.

"Naturally," I say. "What else could have brought you all the way out here? As you know, I'm sure, it's the story of a young woman, a schoolteacher."

"And you play the schoolteacher."

I tilt my head in recognition of her enviable deductive reasoning. "She is engaged to be married -- Monty Clift -- and is finishing her last term when a terrible rumor is started about her and her friend."

"That's Eva Marie Saint's role."

"Right." I shrug. Hysterical women rarely draw my gaze.

"I hear the play was quite scandalous. The rumor about the girls, I mean."

"It's certainly modern. But don't you think we've come far enough to be more straight-forward about these things? This is Hollywood, after all."

Janie drops her pencil and bends down slowly to retrieve it. She is bare-legged and has dark pink impressions on the tops of her feet where other ill-fitting shoes have rubbed her raw. "But the girls," she says. "They are. Aren't they a little queer?"

I laugh, the full-throated chuckle Addison once called leonine. He told me to reserve those sounds for special, private occasions. "They are rather like sweethearts, now that you mention it."

"So that's not -- that's not what the picture is about?"

I touch her arm. "What kind of thing do you think we're making?"

"Oh, I. Of course." She blushes and erases something, whisking the shavings off her pad with a trembling hand.

"Of course, like any picture, the audience will see in it what they want to see in themselves. True fans always do."

Janie's flush spreads down her throat to her chest. She coughs weakly and sucks the last of her iced tea from the glass. When she has sufficiently recovered, she says, "At the annual meeting of your fan club, five girls reported they'd named their daughters Eve. How does that make you feel?"

"Flattered, of course. Though I can hardly take credit for the name itself. Maybe they name their little boys Adam, too." I'd rather have no fans at all than allow them the power of association. But I have learned from my mistakes. I always do.

Martha rescues me with a tray of sandwiches and another round of drinks. She is a profoundly ugly old hag with an impeccable talent for interrupting at precisely the right time. She's been with me for going on five years, squirrels her salary away in a tin beneath her bed under a stack of Playboys and has absolutely no desire to be in pictures. She is the only person on Earth I trust even a little.

Janie eats stupidly, if politely, cooing over the avocado as if I had grown it myself. Her platinum hair is leaking out of her bun, flaxen wisps sticking to the sweat at her neckline in the afternoon heat. She is more beautiful as she comes apart and I rouse myself for a few meaningless rounds of small talk. She lives with an elderly aunt in Glendale, has a distant cousin in New York who made a telephone call to get her this job, and isn't sure how she feels about women who set aside success to become mothers. She would love to see my sitting room.

I have no robe, but as I haven't come within a yard of the pool one isn't really required. Janie trails behind me as we make our way back to the house, and I carefully slow my pace under the dappled light in the hanging garden. She collides with me, and her hand grazes my bare back as she steadies herself. I turn and catch her eye over my shoulder. "Better watch your step." She nods shakily.

The house is cool, the air almost damp. I make Martha keep the shades drawn just for this moment, this chilly reception. Janie shudders and rubs her arms. "Cold?" I ask.

She nods and hugs herself more vigorously. "Aren't you?" She is staring at my body, at my bathing suit. I stretch my arms above my head and laugh, dark and low.

"It's warmer over here." I perch on the arm of the love seat.

She takes three steps forward, and when she is within arm's reach, I draw her nearer. She shivers. Her skin is soft, lightly browned. A small muscle in her cheek hiccups when I touch her face.

"You're a modern girl, aren't you, Janie?"

"I -- I guess so."

"You have your own career, your own ideas. You think for yourself."

She nods, and I kiss her hard on the mouth, pressing a hand between her shoulder blades to keep her close. She gasps and pulls away, shoving me back onto the couch. I count myself lucky to have avoided being slapped, but even that's not the worst I've gotten.

"I -- Miss Harrington! How dare you touch me like -- like you know me."

"Don't be silly. Everybody does it. Nobody talks about it."

I tuck a stray curl behind my ear and lean forward to pluck a cigarette from the holder on the table. The lighter crackles and the paper hisses and burns. The smoke smells like Margo, sweet and strong.

Janie is standing with her arms crossed angrily. "You're just a girl," I say. "A fan."

"A reporter," she says, the picture of prim indignation.

"Oh yes, I'd nearly forgotten. Like to take a picture while you're here?" She shakes her head no. I tap ash into a porcelain bowl I stole from an otherwise garish set. "How about an autograph?"

She smoothes down her skirt. "No, thank you."

"You can go ahead and let yourself out, then." I cross my legs and relax into the velvet cushions.

When I open my eyes, Martha is standing over me, tall and sturdy as a redwood. She is frowning and holding a stenographer's pad. "That lady left this by the pool," she says.

"Well, you better send it on over to her. We wouldn't want her trying to come up with her own story, and you know all the studio girls are too busy preparing for the awards to write something up like usual."

"Speaking of awards, we have to get your dress fitted."

I stretch upwards and Martha drapes a robe across my shoulders. "Wasn't that little brunette from the shop supposed to come by and take my measurements?"

"She's busy."

I light another cigarette because I know Martha hates the mess they make. "I'm busy, but I still have to wear a dress."

"She says she won't stand for being left alone with you."

"Honestly," I say, standing to go upstairs for a bath. "You'd think they'd never been kissed before."

"One of these days," Martha intones. It is her frequent warning.

One of these days I'll get myself in trouble. One of these days I'll learn to care. One of these days I'll get over her.

 


End file.
